Why do we need this?

We started off with official Golang builds for vanilla architectures like 32-bit and 64-bit Intel systems but have now gained a growing list of pre-built binaries available. This even covers the Raspberry Pi.

Having an up-to-date binary package available for ARMv8 will make Go and dependent projects like Docker, Kubernetes and Prometheus easier to work with and maintain.

These are two very different machines, but for a few hours usage neither will cost very much.

Get Go the quick way

Let's show how to provision a machine on Packet and then install the (unstable) Golang binary for 1.9.

Sign up for a Packet account and then create your server as follows:

You can pick the nearest datacenter to you. The Type2A can be very popular - so if one is not available near-by you can select one of the other facilities.

You can click the Manage button to enter any additional SSH keys you need and to setup your cloud-init script. The cloud init can do things like install Docker, monitoring tools or a development environment - so that they are ready when you first log in.

The provisioning takes a few minutes - unlike AWS or Azure we're actually provisioning a bare-metal machine which means there are no CPU credits, no firewalls and no restrictions. It's all on you.

We're provisioning a vanilla Ubuntu installation - but Packet also supports booting up custom images over iPXE meaning you can run practically any OS you like.

Logging in

By default you need to login as the root account using your ssh key. If you need it you can also find out what the password is - but only for the first 24-hours. So if you need that make sure you change it or memorize it right away.

$ ssh root@147.75.74.62
Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-77-generic aarch64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.
root@go-for-it:~#

Download the latest Golang build for ARM64 - at the moment this means clicking on the Unstable set of releases: